Walking the Ghost by Adam Spiegelman
September 25, 2022. It is a 40 minute walk from the nearest train station to the spot along the water in Queens where Nick died, two years ago today. There are two bridges to cross on the way there and the sky is a sullen gray like an ice rink after heavy traffic; the air is thick with mist. I have sunglasses on, my hood up, and an umbrella, and I feel as if I am traveling into the past. If I see a bag on the ground that’s a sign and I’ll do it. If I run into one of the people I owe money to around here it’s a sign. Of what? In prior weeks, against the dizzying heat of a distended summer, I began to retreat from life as the familiar horizon of grief again advanced. All around me, the world has become very strange, indeed. I feel I am seeing things through a series of layered transparencies—street signs and storefronts and park benches surrounded by spectral counterparts drawn from separate memories, each slightly warped or askew.
In a poem, To Charles Williams, written in honor of his late friend, C.S. Lewis writes about loss disrupting the integrity of the self. He says, “Your death blows a strange bugle call, friend, and all is hard / To see plainly or record truly”. This death has unmoored him, made the familiar dubious, turned him everywhere into a mere visitor, his own life a foreign country. “Is it the first sting of the great winter, the world-waning?” He asks, “Or the cold of spring?”
The closest street address to where it actually happened is a Department of Sanitation Building in an industrial part of Maspeth, Queens. In the cul de sac, a profusion of wildflowers obscures what was once the entrance to a small creekside encampment. I push through the undergrowth. Gone are the shack, the tents, and the shopping carts. On a sliver of rocky beach, a balled-up tarp is studded with orange caps, aluminum cans, and chip bags. New growth has obscured the old contours of the embankment and I am, jarringly, returned to the alien present. Confused, I search for evidence of the cabin’s foundation, for the saint candles I lit on this date last year. No luck. I look across the water at the Kosciusko Bridge, I stare through the mist at the concrete factory, I listen for that strange bugle call, expecting to hear my name in his voice.
From the beginning, Nick was a secret within a secret.
From the beginning, Nick was a secret within a secret. I first saw him late one night in Chinatown—spring 2017—stumbling up Mott Street past seafood markets fronted with sodden wooden troughs, the last of their ice dumped to melt on the curb. He leaned on his bike like a walker, hair long and dreading, eyes all but closed. I was wary, having heard of him through a pair of troubled rich girls I knew he was ripping off, selling them dope at an extraordinary markup. I had recently reentered bona fide heroin addiction after a few agonized on-and-off-and-on-again years, and was still able to maintain a plausible daylight existence at the expense of a family kept at arm’s length. Everything about the man repelled me—his hands like fossilized mitts, the colorless skin of his face that sagged like boiled meat from the bone. When he stopped beside me and spoke, his eyes were fluttering slits but his voice was calm and conspiratorial, surprisingly soft. I leaned towards it. “She not picking up her phone for you either?”
Junkies love to demonstrate their mastery, their medical expertise. Some of their sacred folk medicine: the cold water extraction; ascorbic acid, lemon juice, or white vinegar for shooting crack; using table salt to scrub the film off the inside of a lightbulb; red grapefruit juice; micron filters; ice cubes on testicles and in assholes; bioavailability; binding efficiency… When someone would miss a shot and blow up their shit, you’d sometimes hear another scabby, nodding junkie begin a lecture about using a hot compress to try and prevent abscesses from forming, or to relieve them once they arrive. I might say something like, you just have to cover it in Neosporin, a lot of it, and soak a towel in boiling water then press it down and towards your wrist like you’re rolling out pizza dough. Personally, I’ve never tried it.
Recovery circles propose that for the active addict, the drug fulfills the same role, metaphysically, that the Higher Power is meant to serve for the sober addict—a constant companion and a locus of comfort. In recovery, though, the intended sense of belonging in the world is accessed through communion. In addiction, the longed-for fantasy is of perfect solitude, the obliteration of interrelation. I craved certainty and resolution, I reveled in the crippled physics of my shriveled universe. Time was punctuated by intervals between hits; the ideal day was the undifferentiated one. High or with the mere promise of a high in the foreseeable future, it became possible to endure the busiest shift, trek through a blizzard, rob any loved one or love any stranger, all in service of justice. What is just for the addict is comfort, and what is unjust, evil even, is being uncomfortable. The sick junkie, upon hearing that his dealer is around and holding, miraculously begins to feel well, marginally high even, on the strength of this faith alone, long before ingesting the substance.
Nick and I were not fast friends. We traveled separately in the orbit of a girl we adored, the daughter of celebrities, Jane, who’d recently been introduced to heroin and who we professed to want to keep from harm. At the time, I saw myself, in this triad, as a good angel, Nick as the devil. In reality, we were both enabling and exploiting her, all three of our habits growing steadily more dire. When Jane disappeared suddenly for rehab, Nick and I continued on, in the darkness of winter, bound by the shared loss and the need to combine resources. It began tentatively. Every night between seven and nine, I would tell my roommate (to whom the severity of my addiction was a secret) a transparent lie, walk out into the cold and meet Nick at the Graham Ave station. Together, we would pool our money and go meet his connect, who lived closer to me, had the good dope (not the strongest, admittedly, but the most trustworthy), and who Nick initially refused to let me meet. In return, I would surrender one extra bag to him before he hopped on his bike and disappeared. In all, this took about 25 minutes, and we did it every night. Gradually, as weeks turned into months, I began to let him use in my apartment before departing for the evening, first only in the stairwell, then only if my roommate was gone, until finally, even that boundary dissolved.
There are episodes in my time with Nick that I want to manipulate endlessly, hold like loose gems up to the light, trying to find the angle on which the prism refracts most beautifully. I want some alchemical miracle to change the tenor of memories without disturbing their content. But my obsessive excavation of the past produces no new revelations, no redemptive artifacts. I probe the sites of memory too often, infecting them with the grit and oil of the present. Nick is dead and I am alive. The dead stay put, changeless—we grow unrecognizable to them. Am I trying to change him? I am trying to keep his life suspended, exercising our history to stop it from resolving into slack sentimentality, to keep it from passing from meaning into mere meaningfulness.
I try flattering interpretations or cynical or academic ones. I might remember our later, failed sex as attempts to rejoin the world, to resurface and prove we still had working, useful bodies. And I could remember the failure on its own, the limpness and numbness, and decide we meant to prove ourselves heterosexual.
I could reconfigure his kleptomania as a symptom of love. And that he resisted stealing from me as proof of devotion. I was, incidentally, the recipient of ugly jackets and designer wallets, tee shirts in the wrong size, polaroid film (though I had no camera) and paints I’d never use. It was symbolic, of course; everything would turn into drugs.
Eight months into our friendship, a hot summer day, waiting waiting waiting for our dealer, Simon, to respond, Nick and I walked up Graham Avenue from the BQE to the subway station. We stopped in each smoke shop and grocery store, on a mission to find cucumber-lime Gatorade. He chatted constantly at me, buzzing from shelf to shelf, whipping open refrigerators, juggling unripe avocados. We’d probably shot coke or ketamine or popped Xanax or some combination before venturing out, I’m not quite sure. There was no cucumber-lime Gatorade in stock anywhere. Every time we’d leave one store for the next he’d wink at me and open his tote bag, displaying pints of ice cream he’d stolen. The bag filled up with different flavors and brands as we approached the station. He liked Van Leeuwen the best—the mint chip and cookies n’ cream. At the final grocery store on Graham and Metropolitan, I found the right Gatorade. As I was paying, Nick stumbled out the door behind me, tote bag bulging cartoonishly. The cashier yelled something, hopped the counter, and sprinted out the door after him. I took my Gatorade, glanced around the corner, and ran in the opposite direction.
We reunited a few blocks west, behind a granite and tile warehouse. He was grinning. Everything amused him. Simon texted. As we walked to pick up, he sorted through his bag and tossed the ice cream pints into various trash cans, saving only one. When we got home, he popped the container in the microwave until the ice cream was liquid—warm even, more a soup than a milkshake—and slurped it down.
The medications available for treating opioid dependence are blunt instruments.
On October 1, 2018, Nick left early in the morning and never returned, picked up by the police doing graffiti and, having several outstanding warrants, sent to Rikers. In a letter he sent me from prison, he talks repeatedly about trying to get off dope and methadone. He says, “After being off almost a month, I was still feeling like shit and I was always chasing it and wasting my money. I had to get back on and especially things have been pretty hectic recently and I can’t put myself in danger by being all sick and tired and weak. This isn’t the time or place for anything like that. I really wanted to get off. I just couldn’t do it right now. Honestly that makes me pretty sad. I didn’t want to come out with a habit and have to go to a clinic on my first day out…”
The medications available for treating opioid dependence are blunt instruments. Methadone and Buprenorphine are maintenance opioids, powerful narcotics that people may be dependent on for the rest of their lives or may use to taper gradually off—a protracted withdrawal that ultimately leaves them weakened for weeks, even months. Naltrexone, originally used for alcohol dependence, is an opioid blocker, which occupies the receptors, rendering them unable to initiate the euphoric, high-inducing effects of opioids. It is a pill that needs to be taken orally once a day. Vivitrol (naltrexone in Extended-Release Injectable Suspension) was approved in 2010 for the treatment of opioid dependence and blocks the effects of drugs like morphine, heroin, and synthetic opioids for a period of 30 days following intramuscular administration. To receive Vivitrol or Naltrexone, an addict has to be completely detoxed from opioids for a period of eight to fourteen days, depending on the drugs used. For addicts unable to enter a detox unit or without the time and resources to successfully detox themselves, this is a nearly impossible task.
“Let me do it, let me do it, it’ll be easier,” Nick said. We were showering together, about a month before he went to jail, made momentarily hyper-alert by the extraordinary, bell-ringing shots of cocaine we’d just injected. I felt individual crystalline droplets exploding against my skin. The rumble of water battering the tiles was like artillery, and the sound itself a kind of rising atmospheric pressure. The initial 30 seconds of white light and divine heat following injection had subsided and the frigid horror was again upon me—a feeling of otherworldly dread, unimaginable fear, one I knew with mathematical certainty would arrive and yet felled me every time. There was a terrifying tightness growing in my chest, something badly off. My heart raced faster than it ever had before, despite my perfect stillness. 140, 180, 200 beats per minute, I saw numbers in my periphery, I heard scratching at the door. Colors reached out to touch me: yellow, orange, red, strobing…
I was thin enough to observe the flesh in the upper left-hand corner of my chest pulsating wildly. Transfixed, I expected at any moment to feel the final pop—in my chest, in my neck, my head. I was going to die, I was already dead, I had killed myself. Nick continued to talk at me as I lowered myself to the floor of the shower. He was blessed with a profound, almost distasteful sense of calm, one I’d never encountered before or since—an apparent immunity to panic, to psychosis.
“You said you weren’t going to do this again,” he said, shielding his face from the spray. “You promised.”
“It’s different this time, it’s real, you have to call someone,” I whispered, sure that if I spoke at full volume, my heart would explode. “I’m having a heart attack.”
He didn’t say anything, just stepped out of the shower. An alarming shimmer was now seeping in from the edges of my vision; I was at the bottom of a bright white well.
“Wait, don’t go, can you hold my hand and count breaths with me?” I moved my lips very carefully. They were gray and shingled with fluttering rinds of dead skin. I couldn’t hear myself. An invisible halo of noises had descended around my head, a shriek like a jet engine, like train brakes, wailing metal on metal. Nick returned holding a syringe of smack the color of Aunt Jemima’s and turned off the water. He knelt down. I could see in his eyes I’d fucked his high. He was burning up inside. Roughly, he looped and tightened the belt around my upper arm, shoving the end in my mouth to hold taut without a word.
“You owe me a bun,” he said. His face was stony, disinterested even, but his fingers, probing my forearm for a bulging vein, were gentle and precise. When, finally, crimson darted into amber and he lowered the plunger, the plug was pulled and insanity rapidly drained out of me. I was restored, I was reborn. I couldn’t feel my heart at all; it might as well have stopped. The icy tundra of psychosis had thawed and reasonableness, rationality bubbled up in its place.
I have been getting regular injections of Vivitrol, the opioid blocker, on and off for the past six years. Every few months, my insurance acts as if it’s the first they’re hearing of this medication and threatens not to cover the next dose. Then, my doctor and I have to wait around as we’re transferred from robot voice to robot voice until finally someone somewhere obliges. Without insurance, the retail cost of Vivitrol is around $1,738 a month.
Two days after getting Vivitrol in August 2022, a month before the 2nd anniversary of Nick’s death, I started having pain at the injection site on my buttcheek. I have heard from other recipients about soreness and redness for days after, to the point of having difficulty sitting comfortably, though I myself had never experienced a reaction. On the third day after the shot, my left butt cheek was noticeably swollen and tender, by the fourth day the pain was so bad I was limping. In the colorectal surgeon’s office I stripped half naked and bent over a table while he shoved a thick needle into the affected area. Fuck, he said and showed me the syringe, now full of a putrid, spam-colored fluid. He scheduled me for surgery the following day at a nearby hospital, where he’d put me under and drain the infection.
The trials of loving an addict as a helpless bystander are well documented. I loved Nick while we used together and continued to even after our paths diverged. When he was arrested, I didn’t have time to cry and shake my fist at the sky, nor did I have the resources or wherewithal to bail him out. It was just over. Without a single handhold left in the living world, I fell and fell. My body was in tatters. I used drugs for two, liquidating everything, determined to leave no trace. I would die just like they promised. I overdosed twice, my dick dripped nonstop bloody piss, my legs were cratered with skin ulcers. Jails, institutions, or death, they say in AA, the ends are always the same. But I balked at death. I fled the city for institutions, and I got sober; Nick continued to the bitter end. While he was still alive I often wished he would die and sometimes acted as if he already had. These are thoughts I am sure members of my family had about me, too, though I have never asked.
Because Vivitrol blocks the effects of opioids, and because of my well-documented medical history of substance abuse, the doctors and nurses at Mt. Sinai West took turns regretting to inform me that I would have to take ibuprofen following the procedure, and that it might be moderately to severely painful. The worse news was, because of the nature of the infection, and the size and placement of the incisions being made, the wound would have to be kept open with drains for several months following the surgery.
In his 1917 essay, Mourning and Melancholia, Freud describes the process of mourning as cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that…culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. In mourning, there is a turning inwards, a morbid narcissism, the world has become impoverished. In contrast, melancholia is described as grieving for something that has not been lost—a love object that is still within reach, but has changed meaning irrevocably. In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.1 The addict is the terminal melancholic, suffering from a ceaselessly famished ego, one sated—though barely—by the miraculous effect of the substance, and in the romantic relation of addict to substance, which supersedes all others as the primary intimate relationship.
In the time between my getting sober and Nick’s death, certain meanings changed irreversibly. The drugs I could never touch again and all the touchstones and rhythms of life that attended them had become apocalyptic and remote, and Nick, himself emblematic of a chapter closed, stood chief among them. Opioid dependence is a kind of Schrodinger’s cat state of threshold experience. The dope addict is always in oscillation between wakefulness and perhaps-permanent oblivion, life and death indefinitely deferred. He is only a part-time resident of hell, and a perennial tourist in the land of the living.
Reentry into the waking world, the working world, was difficult. I found myself on first dates struggling to explain away the wasted years, to valorize myself, to make light of, dodge, or outright lie. On one occasion, I spoke at length about being an end of life caretaker for my ailing grandparents, on another I was solemn and reticent about the brutality of basic training as a marine. In a dark club, a guy put his hand down my pants and felt the smooth, circular depression on my crotch—the scarred remains of an abscess resulting from a missed hit. Nail gun accident, I blurted out. The urgent, solitary mission of finding and acquiring more drugs was a deep-sea pressure holding the other, incidental parts of my life together, and, having come to the surface, my identity collapsed, had become shapeless and muddled.
After the surgery, my left butt cheek continued to bulge abnormally, now due to the thick dressing required to soak up the constant discharge of pus, blood, and tissue. Bands of plastic and suturing wove in and out of the flayed skin, quilting it like a poorly tied roast. Having to rinse and redress the incisions multiple times a day, the skin around the area became livid and blistered from the bandaging adhesives.
For a few weeks, the dripping gashes took on mystical properties. Daily, I was at the mercy of a body turning inside out. The narcissism of self-pity transfigured a medical mishap into a myth of sainthood. I was being punished for having gotten well while others continued to suffer and die; I was being branded for past crimes I had yet to make right. Upon waking, a lurid brown stain bloomed through the fitted sheet and into my mattress pad. In the shower, dark gobs of blood and gray ribbons of tissue conjured images of continuous miscarriage. My addiction, a once-cherished and carefully nurtured child, now rotten and forcefully expelled.
The perpetual anxiety of bursting, of spillage and overflow held hostage my erotic attention. Laying in bed with the man I had been seeing, Tony, I dreamt of his thrusting penis drawing back from my asshole and piercing instead the wet, forbidden abyss of my surgical wound. We had been having numerous problems in our relationship—failures of communication, games of denial and withholding. I was leaving the door open on a dream of a world that no longer existed and spent all my time loitering on its threshold. Are you still in love? Tony asked me repeatedly, a blanket accusation. Still in love with Nick? No longer in love with him? I didn’t know. Peeling back the bandages, the overwhelming stench of putrefaction would fill the room. The smell of a veterinary office, a zoo.
Even now, years later and sober multiple times over, the story I recount reflexively about Nick’s death and my concurrent relapse is not the true story. In the autumn of 2020, roughly two years into sobriety and two years since I’d last seen him, I finally relented and responded to a text inviting me to participate in a photo shoot he was doing for a magazine. It was disturbing to see him. I wanted to feel the same kind of narcotized adoration—the bliss of infinite postponement, of collapsing into someone, draining into them like a river into a swirling estuary. Instead, when he hopped into my car and hit the crack pipe, I felt I was meeting him again for the first time. I was afraid of being ripped off, no longer a co-conspirator; I was outside the joke.
Recounting the timeline of my relapse, I tell people that when Nick killed himself by filling his shack with carbon monoxide a week after our reunion, the anguish activated a dormant reflex and I was high before I could even register the loss—like a sleepwalker suddenly coming to, knife in hand. People of all ages shake their heads and touch my shoulder, glassy eyed and sympathetic. I hide inside the legibility of this story. The logic all checks out; who wouldn’t be felled by such extreme upheaval? It is an untouchable alibi. I am granted clemency. The truth is I shot heroin the day of our reunion. I wanted to be close to him again, to huddle around the same flickering fire, the sustenance provided by once more sharing a secret. I said, “I drove you around all day, you owe me a bag,” and he gave me two.
The bleeding was continuous, requiring constant care. I lost sensation in the upper outer region of that buttcheek. My relationship with Tony collapsed. I could think only of myself, of monitoring the extremes of my body, afraid of what might escape those crusting vents that seemed to breathe on their own, threatening speech. I courted pity wherever I went. The undressing, lavage, and redressing a kind of retreat to private worship, the wound a surrogate child. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud writes, By taking flight into the ego, love escapes extinction2. Could I reach into the infected pocket and pull out his name?
The scars that remain from my surgery are permanent—three dark puncture wounds, sunken and hard like tufting buttons. They interrupt the erotic act, punctuate it, demanding a pause for address. Repeatedly, I am put on trial, asked to either reveal myself or deliberately retreat. These areas of scarring—striations, ridges, tracks not just on my butt but all over my body—are monuments, promiscuous exhibits of history, demanding a claim or disavowal of authorship.
The confluence of wanting help and being able to get it is usually brief.
September 25, 2020. Later on, after I’ve left the riverbank, I receive a call from a friend of Nick’s, an emissary from the past. She says she has ten hours before she can be admitted to detox the next morning. Around the country, dope fiends lie dead in the aisles of supermarkets and in parked cars and at picnic tables. I pocket waterproof surgical tape at CVS and walk out without paying. I wish her luck, knowing she won’t make it. The confluence of wanting help and being able to get it is usually brief—a flare falling across the sky, then gone.
Earlier in the summer, a good friend of mine, Harry, overdosed and died in his childhood bedroom during a visit to see his parents. His mother asked if I thought he killed himself. I didn’t know what the good answer was, if there was one that might bring his death into coherence, if I could make him heroic. The funeral was packed, which shocked me. I’d assumed I was his only friend, but I was really just his last. Two months from now, in November, another friend, Luke, sober for years longer than I have ever been, will also relapse. He will die the same night. Here is what I’m saying: There is no justice. I saw his body; I saw his black mouth. I will learn that he was the father of three little kids with dark skin and white blonde hair. I will meet his wife for lunch. I will learn that for a year he only washed his hair with tree sap, that they owned a parcel of woods upstate with a small creek running through it. It turns out they’d been planning to leave the city for good. It turns out I barely knew him at all.
Note: Some names in this essay have been changed to maintain privacy.